A PAKISTANI tribal fighter released from Guantanamo Bay this year was holding two Chinese hostages in Waziristan last night in an attempt to force an end to the United States-led hunt for terrorists along the Afghan border.

A group of fighters led by Abdullah Mehsud, who was released from the US prison camp in Cuba in March, strapped explosives to their bodies and threatened to blow themselves up if Pakistani paramilitary forces approached their mud-brick hideout near the town of Tank. Chinese diplomats, aided by American and Pakistani advisers, were negotiating with the hostage-takers.

The operation marks the first time that Beijing and Washington have co-operated in a hostile environment during the United States’s three-year campaign against international terrorism.

The incident has received minimal coverage in the official Chinese media, which have uniformly run in full a story issued by the state news agency on the kidnapping, but it has triggered emotional debates on the internet.

One chatroom posting said: “If we give way to the gangsters this time, more Chinese will be taken hostage in the future. We will take revenge on them. I am sure only this will prevent more kidnapping from taking place.”

Another was one of several that hinted at China’s uneasy relationship with Washington: “Terrorism is a game invented by the Americans. Why should we join it?” Mr Mehsud, the leader of the kidnappers, who is believed to be in his late twenties, was among 26 Guantanamo inmates freed in March after the Pentagon said that they were no longer a threat to America and had no intelligence value.

Mr Mehsud was handed over to the Americans in 2001 after being captured by Abdul Rashid Dostum, the pro- government Afghan warlord. Mr Mehsud’s family is one of the fiercest of the conservative Pashtun tribes living in semi- autonomous South Waziristan. Mehsud tribal elders gathered yesterday in Tank, 12 miles from the siege, to discuss the kidnapping.

Yesterday the kidnappers set a deadline for the withdrawal of troops from the region, after which they said the hostages might be killed.

Later they relented and continued negotiations.

The Chinese Embassy in Islamabad said: “We are very much concerned about our Chinese engineers. We believe they are safe and hopefully they will be released.”

Malik Merajuddin, a local Pakistani MP, who has met the kidnappers, said that the Chinese were being held “in a good environment. They are under guard. They are not chained and the attitude of the kidnappers did not appear aggressive. The kidnappers are calm and cool-minded.”

Chinese diplomats identified the kidnapped men as Wang Ende and Wang Teng, engineers who worked the Gomal Zam dam project in Pakistan for the Chinese state-run Sino Hydro Corp. They were kidnapped on Saturday.

Pakistani forces supported by the United States have been fighting militants in South Waziristan since March.

US officials believe that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders may be hiding along the rugged border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• It’s only Brits who don’t appreciate me, says Blair
• Party’s over for Greek graspers
• White House tightens security for Xmas marathon